Hi I'm very obviously a noob college student and was just wondering, since I've been having trouble with my free Mandriva 2006 installation (trouble as in I can't find any decent online video streamers among other windows multimedia equivalents, which I'm sure there are, among other software installation troubles/nightmares) and was wondering if I should wipe it out and look into buying a boxed set which should hopefully give me a better jumpstart at Linux.

I was also wondering if I could use diskdrake to delete the Linux partition (which doesn't make sense to do WHILE I'm running Linux, can I?) and how to have Windows XP Pro reclaim the space back until I get the boxed version of Mandriva. Note: I am running an IBM r52 laptop, meaning I have no floppy drive to create any sort of boot disk and whatnot.

I would rather ditch Windows completely but I'm not completely comfortable with Mandriva as a complete Windows desktop replacement (--yet, I hope); plus, although my school will allow OS's like Linux and Mac on the network, it technically only officially supports Windows XP Pro (which is ironic, considering the school servers run on Linux).

Thanks

Well, most of the differences are that in the Boxed/Club editions there are more drivers. There are the official nvidia and ATI drivers integrated into the distribution.

Almost any program that you could want for linux is available through urpmi and rpmdrake(the Graphical front end to urpmi) if you've set up your repositories correctly.

You can set up your repositories by visiting http://easyurpmi.zarb.org and following the steps(don't worry it really is easy).

Unfortunately, Linux probably won't be a direct windows replacement for you if you're not willing to take the time to learn how to configure things like video streaming(I haven't bothered to set that up so I can't help you there). A lot of things that would be set up "automatically" in windows might take a little more configuration in Mandriva or any other Linux distribution.

For the formatting issue, if you want to work inside windows, you can use Symantec Partition Magic, it can format common filesytems.

If you want to work within Linux, you can download a Live CD version of linux, Mandriva makes one called Mandriva Move but I'm not sure if it's free or not. The most popular one is Knoppix.

So, I hope I've helped you.

You can just boot off the Mandriva install CD and go up to the partitioning stage of the install if you want to use the Mandriva partitioning program to remove the Linux partitions. You can also get PCLinuxOS which is a LiveCD which has the Mandriva partitioning program.

As purelithium said the main difference between the boxed set is that it has packages for closed-source drivers and some applications (eg. Java, Flash, Adobe Reader). However once you've been to easyurpmi you already have access to all the mutlimedia stuff, even if you've only got the free download version.